Understanding Sectarianism: The History & Future of the Middle East's Gordian Knot

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Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He is the author of Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East, and The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, and is co-editor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa. He is currently working on a manuscript tracing the origins of sectarianism in the modern Middle East.